What a week! What a week! Elon the Saint versus Elon the Dare(Devil). Hackers, airdrops, fake news, real news, Bloomberg paying their reporters if the FUD move the market and so much more. Let's see what happened:
The good news: Let's start with everyone dream, to buy something palpable using crypto, one 22 years old Filipino player used Axie Infinity to earn enough Small Love Potions (SLP) tokens to buy not one, but two houses. There are some big crypto believers out there. One of them is Mike Novogratz (Digital Galaxy guy) with more than 85% of his net worth tied to crypto (Net worth is $6B, so that meanst $5B in crypto). If you were a whale providing liquidity on Uniswap v2, you may get even more money for your buck on version 3.
The bad news: Rari Capital (RGT) was exploited on their ETH pool on Alpha Finance via an ''evil contract' trick. Funny enough, seems that it is the same hacker that hacked Value Defi (VALUE), and his wallet has more than 4000 ETH at the moment. The importance of privacy and decentralization, as a Tennessee guy tried to hire a hitman to kill his wife, paying with Bitcoin from Coinbase. As you can imagine, his wallet gave away his bank account and his name. Trust them too, my American fellow. Another matter, the information gathering malware known as Panda is now stealing wallets, Discord, Telegram and Steam credentials too. Sushi bought Uniswap.com domain and it is redirecting the people to their own exchange. Naughty!
Bitcoin: Newsweek is telling us that 46 million Americans own BTC now. Bitcoin dropped from 55k to 46k after Elon Musk announced that Tesla will not accept them as payment for his cars anymore. SEC hinted that they are not approving a Bitcoin ETH as the asset is too volatile.
Ethereum: ETH went over $4000 at the beginning of this week. We were promised that ETH 2.0 will be here much sooner than expected, maybe even on Winter 2021. Balancer V2 was launched, promising 53% less ETH gas fees. Now, Uniswap said the same, but in reality seems more expensive, we will see if this is true! On Thursday, ETH price reached $4360, resulting in a total market cap of $500B. All time high was $4143, reached this week also. Another ETF, the Van Eck Ethereum Trust, is close to be launched for the first time in US. ETH balances on centralized exchanged are at all time low, with a 11.5% decrease.
NFTs market: Not even the NFT are safe lately, as Larva Labs had a hacker minting rare Meebits NFT worth over $700K, rerolling the minting proces until he could mint some, tricking the contract. A collection of nine rare CryptoPunks, made by the same company, did sold woth $16.9M, despite this issue.
Adoption: Do not go crazy happy yet, but apparently you can sell NFT on Ebay now, except that you may be paid in dollars instead of crypto. Good thing, bad thing, I let you to decide. Moneygram start offering BTC at 17.000 locations across America, doubling the number of physical locations selling it. In UK, Papa John's Pizza decided to capitalize on their previous history with BTC giving away £10 of crypto if you spend £30 or more on selected locations. This is up and running until Sunday. Coinbase had a nice $770M profits in Q1, but other platforms will enter on the market, supporting tokens they did not. Binance is rumoured to be one of them. Binance US CEO Brian Brooks has some daring plans, wanting to increase the staff headcount by five times (x5) and most probably trying an IPO. Peter Thiel Palantir is approving BTC and started to accept it as payment.
What are the best gainers this week? Loopring went up almost 60% this time, followed by EOS with 45% and Matic with almost 30%, middle of the week. Litecoin, XLM and Venus (XVS) went up for some reason too. At least for Venus I know the reason, governance tokens are launched, today at block 7478562 on BSC the snapshot is being taken. you get 1000 governance tokens for each XVS, and one aniversary NFT for more that 10 XVS owned. Kusama is another notable increase, followed by Curve and AAVE.
Altcoins: DFI (Dfinity's Internet Computer) a project aiming sky-high, just got listed on Coinbase, and went up to $700, then down to $250, until finally balanced at around $400. It was also listed on Binance and Huobi lately. If you don't know, Dfinity worked in the last 5 years on this project, aiming to deliver smart contracts running at internet speed. Ubisoft started an accelerator program, helping 5 startups to level up. Aleph.im, Horizon Blockchain Games, Guild of Guardians, Crucible and NonFungible were selected this time. They selected interesting games in the past, such as Sorare and Axie Infinity. YFY is being redenominated as WOOFY, with 1 YFI = 1.000.000 WOOFY, and the price went mad just because this is slightly relating to DOGE, i would say. Crazy ideas!And yes, Doge went up 20% as the whole market went down, following Bitcoin plunge. Even Coinbase want to list Doge soon, and Elon offered to work with Doge developers to improve it. Microstrategy is consolidating their position with another $15M invested in BTC.
Mark Zuckenberg tried to steal the thunder telling everyone that he has a goat called Bitcoin. A scapegoat, maybe? But Elon deserves a whole bullet point this time. He is making strange moves, first going to Saturday Night Live, making Dogecoin to go down, then asking on Twitter if Tesla should accept Doge for payments (with more than 76% followers saying yes), but in one surprising turn of events, he said that Tesla cannot accept BTC as payment anymore due to environmental damage made by Chinese miners. That seems rich given that the electricity his cars use it is also using the same coal as the Chinese miners. Did he kill BTC? Doesn't matter, we will use DOGE to pay for a mission to the Moon. You can even buy houses in Portugal now using Doge.
Big time news, Tether released a breakdown of their reserves, and I must to admit, it is better that I was thinking. Cash and cash equivalents 75.8%, secured loans 12.5, corporate bonds, funds and precious metals for 10% and 1.6% in other investments including BTC.
And the fun one for last, after Shiba Inu developers tried to boost the awareness of their tokens giving some trillions tokens to Vitalik, he turned the tables donating all of them for charity, and India Covid Relief fund. He also donated the ELON tokens worth $336M to another charity, Methuselah Foundation and few others.
That's all for today.
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands - Hearthstone-like card game) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim)
...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi and Celsius.network. Get ETH while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Check my Lbry.tv channel in here and use Torum instead of Twitter . I am also writing on Read.cash.
...the most lucrative faucets that I use: ZEN, ZEC, DOGE. Start mining Helium (NHT) for free on Emrit.io.
Nice